A multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) database often has many transactions simultaneously accessing or seeking to access the data of the database. MVCC databases simultaneously maintain multiple versions of data that are accessed by both read and write transactions. To determine which version of data a particular transaction may access, a transaction token including a status of the transactions is maintained and provided for use with the transaction. These transaction tokens however, especially in situations when there exist long running transactions, may become very large which slows down overall processing of the database system on which they are used.